A young Cambodian girl practices reading in school. Education is
key to reducing the vulnerability of girls and women to human sex trafficking
in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (Courtesy of UNICEF Cambodia)

"Book on Pol Pot? Bracelet?” In the ruins of Angkor
Wat, two young Cambodian girls hawked their wares with entrepreneurialism
beyond their years.

Their questions were calibrated to win over American tourists: “What if we can
tell you the name of the American President and the population of Cambodia? Then will you buy something?”

They were smart, but it was a Tuesday morning and these young girls weren’t in
school. I asked them why not.

“Our families need the money so we must sell things,” said the elder of the
two. But couldn’t they make more money later on with an education?

“Well, I can just find a rich husband instead,” giggled the smaller girl. “Then
I will be rich too!”

These girls exhibit some of the most common vulnerabilities to human
trafficking: poverty, lack of education, gender inequality, and the desire for
a better life. In Cambodia, as in many developing countries, boys are expected to
become the primary breadwinners for their families and, as a result, are often
given priority access to nutrition, health care, and education. Girls and women
are also uniquely vulnerable to being trafficked for sex. The U.N. Office on
drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that sexual exploitation accounts for 79
percent of all forms of human trafficking around the world and that women and
girls make up 80 percent of human sex trafficking victims.

Human trafficking is one of the most egregious, widespread, and concealed
violations of human rights in the modern world. In 2000, the Palermo Protocol
broke new ground by developing the first widely accepted definition of human
trafficking: the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt”
of a person by means of threats, coercion, deception, or fraud for exploitative
purposes such as sexual slavery, forced labor, or child soldiering.

A hallmark of human trafficking is the movement of people either within or
across national borders, with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia representing
the largest origin regions of trafficked people and Western Europe, the United States, and Canada serving as prime destinations for these same trafficking
victims. The antitrafficking organization Free the Slaves estimates that
worldwide, approximately 27 million people are currently enslaved for purposes
such as forced sex, labor, and domestic servitude. This is more than double the
number of Africans enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade. Southeast
Asia is a hotspot for human sex trafficking, with Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam ranked either ‘High’ or ‘Very High’ as countries of
origin for trafficked people.

Bringing this tragedy to an end will require broad social
changes. Young women and children in Southeast
Asia, like the girls I met
selling trinkets at Angkor Wat, must be educated about how to defend themselves
from sex traffickers and others who would exploit their vulnerable position.
Men who purchase sex need to realize how deeply prostitution is connected with
human trafficking, a global web of deceit and enslavement that channels girls
from countries such as Cambodia to work the sex trade in countries like the United States.

Transnational Trafficking

One way that traffickers recruit women and girls is by offering
them a job as a waitress or singer in a distant city, and with it the prospect
of a better life. If they accept the deal, girls are told to hand over their
identification documents for the purposes of organizing the journey and in so
doing begin to lose access to their freedom and safety. Once they arrive at
their destination, the girls abruptly realize they have been trafficked for sex
as they are thrown into a brothel or locked in an apartment and forced to
sexually serve clients for the financial benefit of pimps who control them.
Because trafficked girls often end up in a foreign country where they don’t
necessarily speak the language and are under surveillance at virtually all
times, it is extremely difficult for them to get help even if they try to seek
it out. The physical, social, and psychological consequences of human
trafficking make it one of the most heinous human rights abuses. As New York
Times columnists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn describe in their book Half
the Sky, “An essential part of the brothel business model is to break the
spirit of girls, through humiliation, rape, threats, and violence.” UNICEF
estimates that nearly 1.2 million of those trafficked each year are children.

Because of the transnational nature of human trafficking, and
the fact that it involves areas as disparate as education, labor, gender,
poverty, law enforcement, health, and migration, cooperation between
governments is essential. The United Nations Interagency Project on Trafficking
(UNIAP), headquartered in Bangkok,
Thai-land, coordinates projects, activities, and agreements among NGOs, U.N.
agencies, and governments in Southeast
Asia. It relies on a net-work
of local and national organizations to help operationalize inter-national
antitrafficking agreements, which often include providing immediate assistance
to victims and long-term education to young girls in order to reduce their
vulnerability to sex trafficking before it begins.

Educating to Empower

On the national level, antitrafficking efforts rely on
organizations like World Vision, a key UNIAP partner in Southeast Asia that assists with on-the-ground trafficking prevention by funding
groups like the Cambodian NGO Nevea Thmey. Nevea Thmey’s shelter, founded in
1997, offers counseling, medical, legal, rehabilitation, and vocational
training services to the more than 800 girls rescued from trafficking since its
founding and simultaneously reaches out to the community in an effort to thwart
future traffickers. Recently rescued victims join a group of older girls who,
after spending time in the shelter, often volunteer to mentor and teach younger
girls and oth-ers within their community how to detect traffickers’ tricks.
This is particularly useful given the dearth of role models in society due to
the Khmer rouge’s bloody genocide 30 years ago which left a quarter of all
Cambodians dead. Nevea Thmey’s approach dovetails care for victims with
prevention efforts and transforms victims into empowered advocates for change.

Local and international human trafficking experts agree on the
central importance of education in reducing the vulnerability of women and
children to trafficking. Preparing young girls to stand up for themselves
before they ever encounter risky situations is a crucial way to diminish risk.
AFESIP (Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Precaire), an anti-trafficking
organization and one of the largest NGOs in Vietnam, runs a sexual education
and empowerment course for children aged 13 and older with exactly this goal in
mind. AFESIP’s curriculum includes topics such as the dangers and
pleasuresassociated with sexual activity as well as models of safe and healthy
relationships. In order to empower girls to resist unwelcome sexual advances,
the children play games, some of which are as simple as girls practicing saying
“No!” to boys during role plays. Girls are also taught self-defense. The whole
class is later quizzed to reinforce information, and parents are engaged in
discussions about the material so it can be reiterated at home. While teaching
this curriculum in schools has reached many students and served as a model for
anti-trafficking education in Vietnam, low school attendance and completion
still represent significant obstacles, especially when parents deem it more
useful for their daughters to help at home or work than attend school. Such
cultural norms and expectations must change as well if the fight against child
sex trafficking is to be won.

Economics 101: Demand Drives Supply

U.N. and NGO programs such as these do a great deal to combat
human trafficking and meet the needs of victims in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Yet these efforts target only one side of the supply
and demand equation which drives this ignoble industry. The economic value of
the human trafficking trade, the fastest growing of all illicit industries, is
currently estimated at $32 billion. Its gross value recently overtook that of
the illicit arms trade. Doan Thuy Dung, program officer for the International
Organization for Migration Vietnam, noted that “the demand side is also equally
important” whentackling the problem of human trafficking. In basic economic
terms,demand drives supply. In other words, if consumers refused to payfor
domestic servants, forced labor, or sex from trafficked women and children, the
industry would cease to be profitable — and to exist.

Needed then are not only programs that educate and protect women
and children in Southeast Asia, but also the realization by citizens of all
nations — and particularly Westerners whose countries are prime destinations
for trafficked people — that their own behavior, choices, and knowledge affect
the status of human rights around the world. On January 4, 2010, President
Obama designated January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention
month. While this is a small step in the right direction, the United States
continues to spend more in one day to fight drug trafficking than it does in an
entire year to combat human trafficking, reflecting the substantial gap that
remains between speech and action.

The Illusion of Choice

Lina Nealon manages the Hunt Alternatives Fund initiative Demand
Abolition, an activism project which aims to combat human trafficking from the
demand side. Essentially, it is the “market for prostitution that drives sex
trafficking,” Nealon explained. In light of this fact, the most effective
strategy for reducing human trafficking is to decrease demand for prostitution
and for the purchasing of sex more broadly. To start with, men who buy sex must
understand the impact of their choices. According to human trafficking expert
and author Benjamin Skinner, most men who purchase sex are under the illusion
that the majority of women selling sex do so willingly. The reality is that
women trafficked for sex rarely keep money they make from “clients” and are
instead forced to turn it over to pimps, who keep them under lock and key.
Meanwhile, prostitutes who have not been trafficked seldom choose to sell sex
because they actually want to. Of a sample of prostitutes interviewed by
researcher Melissa Farley, 96 percent reported that they would rather be doing
something other than selling sex and would leave the trade if they could.

Although the average age of entry into the business of selling
sex in the United States is between 12 and 14, U.S. federal law considers girls under 18 to be trafficking
victims because they are not of legal age. But men who buy sex from underage
girls do not necessarily visualize them this way. Skinner has noticed that men
who purchase sex often make moral excuses for their actions, convincing
themselves that purchasing sex is “no more or less immoral than paying for a
plumber to fix the toilet.” While the distinct and underlying crime of human
sex trafficking, according to Skinner, lies in the enslavement of those
trafficked for sex, both trafficked and non-trafficked women who sell sex
experience a wide range of serious social, mental, and physical health
consequences.

The Swedish Model

According to Nealon, Sweden’s approach to addressing prostitution is a model worth
emulating. In 1999, Sweden passed the Sex Purchase Law, which criminalized the
purchase of sex but decriminalized the sale of sex. The law takes into account
the fact that a woman who sells sex has often reached this decision because
“society has failed her and left her with no other choices,” recounted Nealon.
The Swedes conceive of prostitution and the sale of sex as inherently harmful
to women due to power imbalances that develop between the buyer and seller. The
evidence suggests that they are right. Farley has found that prostitutes show a
higher incidence of Post-Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) than Vietnam War
veterans and torture victims. That is in addition to the verbal and physical
abuse that women who sell sex endure on a daily basis; their exposure to
sexually transmitted diseases; the stalking, battering, and rape they remain
unprotected from; the anxiety, depression, mental distress, and substance abuse
problems they are not treated for; and the permanent damage done to their
bodies and reproductive systems.

In elementary school, Swedish children are taught about gender equality,
dignity, and healthy relationships and learn to regard the purchase of another
human being as unacceptable. The Sex Purchase Law works in tandem with Swedish
welfare institutions that have increased the social services and job training
available to prostitutes searching for other jobs. The impact of educating
Swedes about equality and respect for women at an early age has translated into
overwhelming popular support for the Sex Purchase Law, a 40 percent decrease in
prostitution over the past five years, and a fundamental cultural shift in the
way Swedish men regard the purchase of sex.

Additionally, an unanticipated but exceptional consequence of the Sex Purchase
Law is that sex trafficking in Sweden has been virtually eliminated since the law’s passage.
In economic terms, traffickers tend to regard countries where prostitution and
demand for sex is illegal as less profitable markets for the women they are
attempting to sell for sex than countries where prostitution is legal. While a
universal ban on prostitution, like that which exists in the vast majority of
American states today, has proven unsuccessful at halting sex trafficking, a
framework that targets the demand side of the sex trafficking equation by
criminalizing the purchasing of sex could yield more effective results.
Recently, countries such as Iceland and Norway have followed Sweden’s lead by outlawing the purchase of sex in Iceland’s case and by criminalizing the purchase of sex acts
anywhere in the world by Norwegian citizens.

Not Such a Party in the U.S.A.

Until American laws change to reflect the progressive and effective
antitrafficking approaches found in many of the Nordic countries, short-run
efforts to reduce demand for sex should begin with a more equitable enforcement
of U.S. law. At present, police departments across the country
arrest pimps, men who buy sex, and women who sell sex under the same law.
However, the ratio of arrests is extremely skewed, with women selling sex
representing 70 percent of those imprisoned in 2008, while pimps and male
buyers of sex made up only 30 percent. Skinner noted that while “prohibition
against it won’t make the crime disappear,” enforcement of U.S. antitrafficking law at the state level is an important
first step in placing more responsibility on men for their choices. Nealon
agreed, stating that harsher penalties in the short run would help men realize
that when they purchase sex, they are not engaging in a “victimless crime.” She
hopes that in the long run, men who buy sex will “gain more awareness and
understanding of what their actions do to communities, women, and men
themselves.”

Nealon also suggested that educating children about gender equality as early as
kindergarten would help change the pervasive culture of impunity surrounding
the purchase of sex in the United States and ultimately decrease the demand for
sex that drives human sex trafficking. Constant references to exploitative sex
in well-liked songs such as “P.I.M.P.” and the popularity of “Pimp and Ho”-themed
parties at many colleges are subtle indicators of how American popular culture
normalizes and even glorifies the purchase of sex. A cultural shift in the way
that people, especially men who buy sex, think about purchasing sex from women,
whether trafficked or not, is necessary to combat human sex trafficking.

Globally, education is one key to bringing the tragedy of sex trafficking to a
halt on both the supply and demand sides of the industry. Ending human
trafficking is not a lofty dream but rather an achievable goal that can be
realized within our lifetimes through international cooperation, the proper
legal framework, and education. If the culture surrounding the sale of sex can
be changed on both ends of the sex trafficking equation, human sex slavery,
along with the vulnerability of the Cambodian girls I met in Angkor Wat to this
trade in human flesh, will become a relic of history.

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